BRAND: PEAPOD
PROJECT: Redesign and supervise the development of a pod marketplace and matching engine to help families and educators create and manage learning pods.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
UX Design
Product management
CONTEXT
The education system’s poor response to the pandemic highlighted many pre-existing shortcomings of the education system in general. Over the past 5 years classrooms have become increasingly overcrowded and underfunded. In addition, while our world has become more flexible + globalized, schools have not caught up and the rigidity of education systems causes major paint points for families.
THE NEED
Responding to an acute shift in consumer behavior and identifying a sustainable need
A learning pod is a small group of children who learn together. The concept of the ‘learning pod’ was born out of a necessity to provide education (and socialization) for children during the pandemic school shutdowns. Parents took it upon themselves to reach out to friends, find educators and create their own learning pods, and many realized pods actually provided more individualized/custom learning than schools, BUT finding kids in the right age group, hiring good educators, and managing schedules and payments was a huge pain point for families.
MY ROLE
UX Designer/Product Manager/Miracle Worker
I was brought on to clean up a mess. The initial product was an overly complex system confined to an app builder - Bubble.io. While Bubble.io is a powerful tool to build a quick MVP, the initial complex features and lack of product management had brought development to a standstill.
PROCESS FLOWS
Where (and why) was development stuck?
My first step was to create proper documentation of the current systems and user journeys to highlight major development and usability issues to see where we could simplify, adapt and clarify in order to move development forward. These visualizations also helped to empathize with end users and begin to conceptualize alternative (simpler) solutions.
DESIGN AUDITS + JOURNEY MAPS
Understanding the human side of development issues
Next, I dove deep into auditing the current pod designs and journey mapping to experience the human side of the development issues. This helped to empathize with the end user journey through the learning pod experience.
‘BEFORE’ SCREENS:
TALKING TO REAL USERS
Now that I understood exactly where, how and why certain complex features were blocking development and had empathized with the user journey, my next step was to prioritize feature inclusion based around the needs of end users. I wanted to discover exactly what parents, students and educators needed from learning pods in general and from a pod software. Here are some of the relevant conclusions I made:
The biggest barrier in pod creation is finding interested families with the same schedule requirements and in the same age group (This is our main draw-in).
Parents are ok with a more rigid system/locked in weekly payments as this is how camps + schools etc. operate.
Parents crave simplicity. They want a platform that’s easy to use and doesn’t require any extra effort.
Parents don’t expect complete flexibility from educational services because they’re accustomed to locked-in payments and pre-enrollment.
VISUALIZING THE JOURNEY
The intersection of development issues and user needs
Now that I new more about what end user wanted + needed from a pod software, I created a user journey map through pod creation, educator hire, enrollment, scheduling and payments. In the map I highlighted pains and gains of both the user and the system, in order to flesh out features that we could alter or eliminate to improve usability and speed up development.
SOLUTIONIZING
How can we simplify to improve user experience and launch our MVP?
While many of the features that were originally included in the designs were good ideas, they were not user-tested and definitely not necessary to launch an MVP using a ‘no code builder.’ In order to launch this product, I needed to simplify, fast. I eliminated/simplified multiple barriers in the payment + scheduling flow that research proved were not necessary for our MVP launch, including split pods, multiple educator pods, flexible pods and curriculum memberships.
NEXT STEPS
We are currently simplifying workflows and implementing new designs. Our expected MVP launch date is July 2021.
Next steps are launching to a select Beta group of teachers and educators to perform rounds of testing and iteration before RC1.